World's largest digital camera can capture 3.2 billion pixels

Curiosity may kill the cat but it also gives impetus and birth to fascinating inventions. The same curiosity led us to the moon and till date we continue to unravel the awe-inspiring secrets of the universe. A testament to this same priceless zeal of enquiry of mankind is the 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera being designed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park. This enthralling contrivance shall be capable of capturing the deepest and widest view of the night sky till date and consuming the least time. This large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera has received “Critical Decision 1” endorsed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) which allows it to traverse into the next production stage.

World’s largest digital camera

The LSST or the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope shall take up the task of appraising the complete visible sky every week. This activity shall generate an overwhelming volume of public archive data amounting up to 6 million gigabytes per year. This figure is equivalent to shooting approximately 800,000 images with an ordinary 8 megapixel point and shoot digital camera every night. The bigger whoop here is that these images shall be of much higher quality and scientific worth. Its thorough and regular cosmic sightings will go a long way in ameliorating the knowledge of the nature of dark energy and dark matter. It will also assist in the studies of near Earth asteroids.

Now let’s keep our fingers crossed, the construction on the telescope will start in 2014 if everything works as planned,.

Via: InMenlo